Whaddya, whaddya? Why Noo Yawk accents are fading

Every morning Curtis Sliwa addresses his fellow New Yorkers on his radio show, speaking in a brogue that is one part Bronx and two parts Brooklyn, pronouncing coffee as “cawfee”, denouncing murderers as “moideruhs”, and generally making Tony Soprano sound like a golf club chairman from Surrey.

“My voice is about as thick and heavy as you can get,” he said yesterday. Yet he fears for the safety of his accent. The old voice of New York, so celebrated in film and television, appears to be fading.

“Current linguistic research finds that many of the defining features of local speech are losing ground,” wrote Kara Becker, an assistant professor of linguistics at Reed University, in a recent article in the New York Post newspaper.